An LA teacher argues that even extraordinary teachers can’t overcome poor classroom situations, like the kind she faces:
The kid in the back wants me to define “logic.” The girl next to him looks bewildered. The boy in front of me dutifully takes notes even though he has severe auditory processing issues and doesn’t understand a word I’m saying. Eight kids forgot their essays, but one has a good excuse because she had another epileptic seizure last night. The shy, quiet girl next to me hasn’t done homework for weeks, ever since she was jumped by a knife-wielding gangbanger as she walked to school. The boy next to her is asleep with his head on the desk because he works nights at a factory to support his family. Across the room, a girl weeps quietly for reasons I’ll never know. I’m trying to explain to a student what I meant when I wrote “clarify your thinking” on his essay, but he’s still confused.
It’s 8:15 a.m. and already I’m behind my scheduled lesson. A kid with dyslexia, ADD and anger-management problems walks in late, throws his books on the desk and swears at me when I tell him to take off his hood.
The class, one of five I teach each day, has 31 students, including two with learning disabilities, one who just moved here from Mexico, one with serious behavior problems, 10 who flunked this class last year and are repeating, seven who test below grade level, three who show up halfway through class every day, one who almost never comes. I need to reach all 31 of them, including the brainiac who’s so bored she’s reading “Lolita” under her desk.
I just can’t do it.
After describing “the challenges of teaching a large and diverse class,” she argues against large classes — but not against diverse classes:
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently said that, in his view, the billions spent in the U.S. to reduce class size was a bad idea. Many countries with high academic achievement, he noted, have accepted larger class sizes to pay talented teachers more and concentrate larger numbers of kids with the best teachers. “The best thing you can do,” he said recently in an interview with Andrea Mitchell, “is get children in front of an extraordinary teacher.”
That’s a common viewpoint at the moment. Every day I see data showing that in countries such as Japan and South Korea, students score higher in reading and math, often with larger classes, and that the U.S. has spent a tremendous amount of money reducing class size to little effect.
But a huge percentage of students in Japan and South Korea pay for after-school tutoring to make up for a lack of individualized attention at school. Finland, with the best scores in the world, has average class sizes in the 20s, and it caps science labs at 16. Still, it’s become a popular fantasy that all you need is a superstar teacher, and that he or she will be just as effective even as budget cuts force us to pack more kids into each classroom.
I’m sure her students would thrive with a little after-school tutoring. That must be what’s missing.
It is amazing that the brainwashing and unconscious self-thought control has gone so far that even people who are seeing it for themselves on the front lines and are clearly describing the problem in terms of the quality of the students, still cannot bring themselves to draw and express the conclusion that … well, the problem is the quality of the students.
It seems obvious that if this teacher could have class sizes of, say, one that the additional attention would in fact improve the level of learning of the student. But improvie it to what? To the point that the person can fill out a job application for McDonald’s instead of total illiteracy? That’s great, but the implication that smaller class size is all that is standing between this group of kids and degrees in medicine or engineering is laughable.
I get the impression that teachers, when their views collide with reality, either (a) adapt, by dropping out of the profession or quietly migrating to the “good schools” out in the suburbs, or (b) double down on their cult-like belief system. We only really hear from the second group.